The First Europeans are Not Who We Thought

In recent years, a tidal wave of discoveries from deep caves and forgotten shelves across Eurasia has begun to upend some of the most deeply held assumptions about our origins. For more than half a century, the prevailing narrative held that Africa was the place where all major branches of the genus Homo diverged. Anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens—arose there, and the split between our lineage, Neanderthals, and other archaic cousins took place on the African continent before various groups migrated outward.